The Sound Projector

In this post we will round up some of the extreme noise items that have of late rolled in through the Sound Projector portcullis, like charging elephants…Presto Records in Italy have put out a cassette of Lasse Marhaug, The Sky Above The Bud Below (P!?011), which comes with a fetish-bondage cover (a rather humourous one at that) and a download voucher provided to all who purchase this 20-minute item. The fabulous Norwegian maestro effortlessly occupies the tiny space with an abundance of exciting, crunchy details as he throws together layers of crackling blather and bleeping flat-o-mophones, giving a good scouring to the headspace and a sound slapping to your aural buttocks. Marhaug always makes it sound like he totally enjoys what he’s doing and that we can all join in the fun. 250 copies of this excellent limited item.

Lasse roars forth again, on The Quiet North (SLR003) from Second Layer Records in London. Come to think of it, I was fortunate enough to meet the friendly Lasse at the Second Layer shop when I went there one bleak November simply to buy some records. From winter 2008, this recording was made with guitar, hunks of metal, effects pedals and mics, and it features the all-out rock-mode tornado buffet-blast aspect of Lasse’s work. Just short of 30 minutes in duration, but it’s like a bout with a seven-foot boxer wearing gloves made of brushed platinum. Beautiful fold-out package with stark monochrome photographs, conveying desolation and abandonment in the northerly climes.

I’ve had these two items by Filthy Turd lurking in one of my many boxes for a while now, and by rights they should have been included in issue 18 somewhere. The project name is offputting (hmm, no fooling?!), but the CDR Eager Meat / The Corpse Vanishes (BARFING DAGGER RE-RECORDINGS 087) is a fantastic episode of abrasive and sinister monotonal growling which I find very pleasing, despite its obvious limitations and the fact that it slowly evolves into something even more suffocating and unbearable. If Magneto made a sound like this whenever he appeared on screen, then I’d probably enjoy the X-Men movie franchise a lot more. I seem to recall the cassette Death Ray Orgasm / No Sexual Hygiene (SPACELESSJAM SPACE 07) is also a piece of vile grunge which admirably lives up to the ambitions of its scuzzy title. To make things even more difficult, the CDR has been coated with an unpleasant gritty substance, making it repellent to the touch. Filthy Turd appears to be English and has a connection to my favourite band of obscure absurdists, The Bongoleeros.

The CD by Hate-Male just arrived from Somerset a few days ago. I’m checking into the emergency ward tomorrow. Lawrence Conquest’s Greatest Hits: A Decade of Noise 1999-2009 (DOGBARKSSOME DISCS DBSD 16) comes with a health warning printed on the back, advising us ‘This Album Contains No Music’, and his press notes are filled with liberal superlatives and four-letter words from the mouths of overwhelmed music reviewers who express widespread horror mingled with masochistic delight when describing the effects of this extremely extreme brand of noise. Even Masami Akita has given his personal endorsement to Conquest’s work. To assemble this assaultive torrent of painful filth, Hate-Male judiciously selected elements from albums in his back catalogue (whose titles all rejoice in sex, death, nihilism, destruction and violence) and refashioned them into these mangled, compressed and ultra-intensified remixes. Most of the power comes from the extremely high volume (he must go to great pains to ensure the CD pressing plant meets his unfeasible requirements), but even within a few moments of listening it becomes clear that Hate-Male’s compositional skills are also paramount, as we witness him marshalling and assembling his diabolical forces with conviction, controlling his insane dynamic ranges in such ways as to unleash elemental, unholy energies. The record is strewn with elaborate titles and upsetting images (all used with jet-black humour) to transform the entire mess into a “concept album” on the theme of boxing, hitting, punching, belabouring and generally inflicting damage and pain with the fisticuffs, just in case we didn’t get the idea. A remarkable, visceral experience awaits the listener brave enough to purchase this monstrous abomination.

We received this generous parcel from SuperDeluxe in Tokyo, which appears to be affiliated to Medama Records in that heaving, futuristic city of the East. Seems that since 2002 SuperDeluxe has evolved into a vibrant multi-media venue, rich with activity in the areas of music, sound art, cinema, theatre, dance, and other practices of delirious creativity. While the space has tended to favour showcasing local Japanese talents, not a few international geniuses are also invited to exhibit their sonic wares – as is now evidenced by three hefty compilation discs, which are what tumbled out of this card envelope marked with the imprecation “*Please look INSIDE!!*” and promising me “Good Music From Tokyo with LOVE!!”. The comps, packed in sturdy card covers with paste-on artworks (like miniature LP sleeves), are themed on different aspects of the abundant noises which the curators wish to draw to our attention. Test Tone Anthology Disc 1 serves up ‘improvisation and stark electronica’. They’re not kidding. 14 sparkling examples of marginal and extreme electronic music from a host of Japanese players who, with the exception of the famed Government Alpha, are completely unknown to me, although there are also some sacrificial offerings from Tim Olive (the Canadian improviser who lives in Osaka) playing with Kelly Churko as Toque; and none other than the austere Zbigniew Karkowski, turning in 5 minutes of insufferable grinding with the help of Christophe Charles. The rest of the show (drawn from the years 2006-2009) is equally compelling, not a cliché anywhere within earshot, and packed with charm, ideas, imagination and craft. Now I’m greatly looking forward to getting my cat-like paws wrapped around the remaining two discs, of which Disc 2 focuses on environmental and field recordings, while the tertiary item gives us ‘an insider’s view of what goes on outside business hours in downtown Tokyo’, concentrating on band performances of avant rock and free jazz. Astonishing and exciting collection which will renew our interest in the flourishing worlds of Japanese music and open up our ears to some of the more obscure and marginal musicians (for too long our perceptions may have been clouded by a surfeit of psychedelic rock, Onkyo, and overshadowing giants like Haino, Merzbow and Otomo). I also see that Cal Lyall, one of the players in the sprawling improv-freaks Tetragrammaton, is involved. I’m only slightly disappointed by the rather unadventurous cover designs, but otherwise these beauts will make an essential addition to your art-music shelf.

In Stereo (EDITIONS MEGO eMEGO103) sees the reunion of the very occasional trio formation of Fenn O’Berg, a notorious collaboration between the Mego stablemates Peter Rehberg and Christian Fennesz, with the omni-taskmeister and musical eat-everything machine from America, Jim O’Rourke. As we learned from the recent bumper round-up of their extant works on double CD (noted here), their exploits confused and angered many in the concert-going world, and they were widely perceived as too zany and stylistically unfocused to be taken seriously. It may perhaps be significant that these studio-bound sessions, for which the raw materials were created during a week in a Tokyo recording facility, are notable for their austerity and minimalism, almost as if the players (now older and wiser by nine years) were deliberately avoiding the humour and playfulness of their earlier incarnation. I’ve been dipping into the first three-four cuts on this CD and so far everything is coming up slow, ambient, textured, and almost bleak in its photographic grainy desolation. However, I’m finding some livelier moments in what is roughly the second half of the act, where everything seems to be piling up on fifteen different collision courses, except that all the dodgem cars are made of foam rubber instead of sheet metal. Apparently there are numerous real acoustic instruments being played on here, but it’s admittedly hard to tell in amongst the streams of digital reprocessing and the deliberate effacement of individual contributions. Will be released officially in a few days, and if you buy it as a double LP you get a bonus piece of music.

Soft Abuse in Minneapolis just sent us Ulaan Kohl’s III (SAB038), the third part of Steven R. Smith’s Ceremony trilogy of heavy avant-psychedelic guitar overload of which we have heard at least one installment. Smith won his spurs with the Jewelled Antler collective, a ramshackle affair of mysterious proportions whose exact membership has never been totally clear to me, but one I often associate with introverted and self-exploratory music. As Ulaan Kohl, Smith doesn’t stint on amplifier volume nor on use of FX pedals (his use of the Crybaby Wah-Wah, an often neglected device sneered at for its rockist connotations, is particularly forceful), yet remaining true to those Antler roots, he still finds time to soar off on mystical flights in his own private mental helicopter. The centre-spread photo appears to have been shot from just such an angle, and it depicts an improbably huge gothic mansion perched on the side of a mountain and to my mind it could have been photographed anywhere from Mongolia to Estonia. Its blue colour scheme and generally awe-inspiring subject matter may be one of the elements which is now earning Smith comparisons with the almighty Popol Vuh.

From same label, we’ve a CD promo of an LP Orange Trumpets (SAB034), released last September by The Deadnotes. It’s an intriguing item packed with short and clunky instrumental pieces made with guitars, clarinets, trumpet, melodica and the most inept drumming you ever heard since The Godz. These 30 snippets feel more like sketches for tunes being put together in someone’s front room with scissors and paste, and what I hear so far has a very attractive immediacy and spontaneous feel. Fans of Maher Shalal Hash Baz should bend a toe in the direction of this curio.

Three items we hath from the oddball American label of twisted impro-racket Acheulian Handaxe. Chatter Blip (aha 0805) gives us some 52 minutes of Grade-A formless electronic blat from Dafna Naphtali and Chuck Bettis, the latter being a NY noisester whose Sonic Sigils solo mini still brings a tear to the eye of many. They made this concoction using live electronics and their own voices, mangling and refashioning their outpourings like so much modelling clay in the hands of idiot-savant nursery school teachers. In doing this, they create gnobbled and gnarled shapes you can almost feel bubbling in your gut. The record contains a ton more craft and inspiration than we find in many examples of harsh noise, and I look forward to the day when I have more time to run my fingers sensuously over these inviting curves. The seven titles are enhanced by the inclusion of short paras of sci-fi styled nonsensical prose, further enhancing the unreal mood created by this strange record.

Blackbox (aha 0803) didn’t have quite the immediate tasty-factor of the above lump-fest for me, but the anti-magnetised combination of Axel Dörner’s trumpet and Erhard Hirt’s wispy guitar is beginning to make more sense over time, especially when Hirt’s mixing desk and effects board gets locked into a waferised wodge of unnatural unpleasantness, to which Dörner’s only response is to puff out an exasperated bleat from his brass bell. For most of the time on these two lengthy tracks, the duo seem to be exploring each other’s airspace with the sterile caution of Cold War spies speaking in code. The payoff may well be a nuclear missile attack.

For some reason the label also sent us a CD of modern classical music (aha 0804), featuring Peter Geisselbrecht playing the piano recorded in 2001. It so happens I am a devotee of the music of Charles Ives, so I always welcome another version of his Concord Sonata into my home. These tricky and layered lines of musical thought seem to me to emulate the brain-patterns of Ives’s chosen subjects, the all-American philosopher-literary figures Emerson, Hawthorne and Thoreau who did so much to shape the interior and exterior landscapes of New England. I particularly like the solemnity and gravity with which Geisselbrecht limns the darkened, pondering countenance of Thoreau, an approach which may be worth comparing with the numerous takes that John Cage had on the same subject. Also on the disc, Music Callada I by Federico Mompou, which is something to do with ‘resonant solitude’.

Dawn Of Midi are a trio based in NY and Paris, who despite their name do not use digital or computer instruments on First (ACCRETIONS ALP048CD) but instead operate a traditional acoustic jazz set-up of piano, bass and drums to deliver stark and skeletal updates on the kind of deep-underground free modern jazz that sometimes surfaced on the ESP-Disk’ label in the early 1960s. Interestingly, none of the performers are strictly Afro-American, instead coming from Pakistan, India and Morocco. There’s a lot to be said for their spartan sound, rendered with punchy clarity by their recording engineer Steve Rusch, which exhibits a high degree of interest in what they call ‘the timbral possibilities of wood and metal’. I just wish the team of players could have done a little more to vary the tempo and tenor of the album, which feels a bit samey throughout.

A superb slab of process noise, possibly derived from live percussion and feedback, has been released by Jason Kahn and Jon Mueller, both American avant-drummers with an increasing bent in the direction of minimalist brutalism. Phase (FLINGCO SOUND SYSTEM FSS-009) begins with a three-minute excerpt, to soften you up for the main event which is 39 minutes of compelling and relentless jet-engine devilry that is like having a gigantic flesh-vacuum cleaner run over every inch of your soft, supple skin. When this comes out on 15 March, I expect many a collector to be maxing out their plastic as they compete like crazed iguanas to nab a copy of the limited edition print set that accompanies this download-only item.

I’ve picked up another punishing dose of splintered digital gibberish from Spruit, the Netherlandish experimenter whose very extreme improvisational statements we noted previously here. Patterns (SOUL SHINE THROUGH 03) is a pretty intense stab of mayhem promising death by hot needles, said needles working back and forth in some grisly sewing machine mechanism, and was produced using electronics, a digital turntable and the ‘Kaoss mixer’. Spruit has paid close attention to what the critics and pundits say about his work, and feels concerned that his previous efforts have been considered ‘exhausting’ by some. Patterns is his concession to those of us who can’t keep up with his lighting-changes, and is intended to give us some breathing space. Yet it’s still hard work. Even though it’s a quite short mini-CD, I already feel like I’ve been dragged on a marathon hike over difficult terrain with lead weights on my shoulders.

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The Sound Projector Radio Show 26 February 2010

1. Keiji Haino, extract from Execration That Accept To Acknowledge, USA FORCED EXPOSURE FE-032 CD (1993)
2. Track 1 from The 21st Century Hard-y Guide-y Man, JAPAN PSF RECORDS PSFD-68 CD (1995)
3. Track 2 from Tangled Up In The Universe, My Pain, JAPAN PSF RECORDS PSFD 8020 CD (2005)
4. ‘My Only Friend’, from A Challenge To Fate, FRANCE LES DISQUES DU SOLEIL ET DE L’ACIER CDSA 54029 CD (1994)
5. Track 6 from Tenshi No Gijinka, USA TZADIK TZ 7203 CD (1995)
6. Track 3 from Hikari Yami Uchitokeaishi Kono Hibiki, JAPAN PSF RECORDS PSFD-8017 CD (2003)
7. Track 7 from To Start With, Let’s Remove The Colour!, JAPAN PSF RECORDS PSFD-8014 CD (2002)
8. ‘You who will in no way I who can in no way’, from A Challenge To Fate, op cit.
9. Extract from Affection, JAPAN PSF RECORDS PSFD-23 CD (1992)

A pleasure to hear once again from Michael Renkel in Berlin. Can it really be over ten years since we dug the Möwen and Moos release from Activity Center, his electro-acoustic improv project duo with percussionist Burkhard Beins? The calendar cannot lie! lohn & brot (ABSINTH RECORDS 017) is the new release to issue from the nimble fingers of these musical watchmakers, a natural development of their work which finds them continuing to hammer, scrape, pluck and blow musical instruments in exciting new ways that completely subvert “normal” musicianship, but now adding electronic devices and computer software to the equation, and doing more of it on the table top. The pair distinguish themselves from one thousand other gosthoons who think that if they pick up a spinning top, cover it with cheese and attach a contact mic to it they’re well on the way to being the next John Cage. This is mainly because Renkel and Beins use their brains, they can actually play and improvise in meaningful ways, and they connect and interact to produce music and sonic effects of the first water. This is particularly evident when you hear them stretching out on the two long tracks here (one of them nearly half an hour in length), where they sustain the music unflaggingly and abundant low-key genius continues to flow from the speakers in unfailing supplies. Enough intricate detail here to keep your mind occupied for many moons as you untangle the skeins of thought. Limited edition pressed in an outsize cream-coloured greeting card folder, decorated with treated photo-artworks by Renkel. Fine work all round.

Beyabbers! More primo material from the amazing Elodie Lauten, the lost NYC minimalist dream-world cinematic creatrix of the 1980s, whose The Death Of Don Juan opera was something of a revelation to us last year. Now Unseen Worlds deliver the goods once again on this terriff double-CD collection Piano Works Revisited (UW05). Disc one rescues two of her rare private-press LPs originally released on her own Cat Collectors label, namely Piano Works from 1983 and Concerto for Piano and Orchestral Memory from 1984. On the former, some taut and crisp work from Lauten playing five gorgeous compositions realised with piano, sequencer and sound loops; her use of electronics and tape is severe and sparing, emphasising the supremely romantic boniness of these evocative semi-surreal explorations, titled with such novelistic epithets as ‘Alien Heart’ and ‘Imaginary Husband’. On the Concerto music, she’s joined by Arthur Russell, Peter Zummo and others, adding strings and brass to her slightly more atonal and complex piano-based works, recordings where the vast Fairlight sampling computer is brought into play, adding a great spectral cathedral-like quality to the overall sound. The second disc contains longer works from 1991 and 1985, one of them recorded live, not yet played at time of writing. I think the label are pretty excited about getting this one together, and with good reason. Will be out next month!

Also from NYC, the composer-performer Geoff Gersh with a CD of sad droney music which he creates with bowed guitars, zithers, tapes and treated field recordings. The music on These Predicaments (DEEP LISTENING DL 42 2009) is specifically intended to act as an aural accompaniment to the gloomy paintings of David Stoupakis, one of which appears on the cover – depicting a very put-upon man-child Pied Piper whose flute-driven project to rid the town of rats appears to be going horribly wrong. I can see why Deep Listening might be attracted to a man who uses metal to bow an instrument (who can forget the 1989 metal cello LP by Robert Rutman on Pogus Productions?). Gersh’s music on the other hand, while accomplished and highly polished, is not as abstract or abrasive as that, and feels a bit too narrative and sentimental for this listener.

More ambient droning from Warning Light, on the American Stickfigure label. Further On (stick040cd) is made entirely with synthesisers whose tones are layered up into a deliberately gigantic cake of sound, its crumbly strata pasted together with sluggish butter-cream. Bits of this work quite well when the player emulates foghorns and Hammond organs, but generally it suffers from the same problems of open-ended formlessness we often encounter in this genre. From same label, the restless and rootless experimentation of the somewhat irritating Lid EMBA can heard on Terminal Muse: Red (stick046cd), an EP which doesn’t know where to put itself as it swaps around and changes styles in reckless fashion.

From the excellent UK Touch label, we have a very powerful minimalist droner in the shape of Eleh, whose Location Momentum (TOUCH TO:80) actually does indeed warrant all the comparisons to Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Eliane Radigue et al which are often glibly invoked by many lesser talents. This is the first I ever heard from the enigmatic Eleh project, which in fact goes back to 1999 and has been well represented with small-run vinyl editions on the American label Important Records. For those who enjoy having their carnal frame gently massaged by deep bass tones and relentless oscillations until your outline starts to turn fuzzy and indistinct, then my advice is to purchase this long-form masterwork immediately and play it at home over enormous speakers. Apparently best practice requires you to sit about seven feet away from those speakers. When you hear the record, you’ll understand why.

The Invisible City is a very suggestive title which might be regarded as one of the subtexts for the entire Touch project; I would suggest strongly that most of Jon Wozencroft’s work as AER is about attempting to capture some glimpses of an invisible city through clandestine tape recordings and judicious collaging. BJ Nilsen’s new release of this title (TOUCH TO:77) is, perhaps surprisingly, quite spartan in its use of field recordings and has been largely realised through minimal instrumentation (including the exotic-sounding Subharchord), electronics, tapes, computer work, and non-musical activities such as door slams, chair dragging, walking through snow, and – most intriguingly – the sound of dead trees leaning against each other. The field recordings come from birds and insects, among other things, and like Chris Watson’s work for this label suggest there are entire universes of significant events taking place on various levels, which we’re missing out on because we won’t take the time to seek them out. An astonishingly mystical compilation results from Nilsen’s pan-global investigations. For all his minimal technique, it’s one of his more maximal releases, is very varied to listen to, and it poses many wonderful questions about unknowable and unseen things in the world.

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The Sound Projector Radio Show 19 February 2010

1. Sudden Infant, ‘Industrial Music Makes Me Sick / Jawohl!’
   From My Life’s A Gunshot: Retrospective 1989-2009 Vol. 1, HRÖNIR hr8909 2 x LP (2010)
2. Raudive Bunker Experiment, ‘Song For Robert’ (1982)
   From Raudive Bunker Experiment, YOUDONTHAVETOCALLITMUSIC YOUDO 04 2 x LP (2010)
3. Thulebasen, ‘Brintbombe’
   From Æsjo, ESCHO ESC10 LP (2009)
4. Mark Glynne / Bart Zwier, ‘Dotted World’
   From Home Comfort, DIVORCED RECORDINGS DIV 1 LP (1980)
5. Von Bingen, ‘The Futility of All Effort, the Vanity of All Plans’
   From Von Bingen, AMEN ABSEN 002 LP (2009)
6. *Retro*Sex*Galaxy*, ‘How does a Microscope Magnify’
   From Zajmujaca Fizyka, GAGARIN RECORDS GR 2008 LP (2003)
7. Mit Nye Band, ‘Mit Nye Band’
   From Mit Nye Band 2004-2009 Vol. 1, ESCHO ESC14 LP (2009)
8. Terry Fox, (Side B)
   From The Labyrinth: Scored for 11 Different Cats, CHOOSE RECORDS 11CATS CHOOSE LP (2009)
9. Mark Glynne / Bart Zwier, ‘Tonight’
   From Home Comfort, op cit.
10. The D., (Side A)
    From D.A.F., THE D INSIDE D 003 LP (2010)
11. Matt Rösner, ‘Repeat’
    From Repeat, MIATERA MUSIC 2009-002 LP (2009)
12. Sudden Infant, ‘Riot’
    From My Life’s A Gunshot, op cit.
13. Edward Ka-Spel, ‘Christmas on the Moon’ (extract)
    From Trapped In Amber, PLINKITY PLONK PLINK 25 LP (2009)
14. Raudive Bunker Experiment, ‘Faith’ (1982)
    From Raudive Bunker Experiment, op cit.
15. *Retro*Sex*Galaxy*, ‘Voice instead of tape measure’
    From Zajmujaca Fizyka, op cit.

Last Saturday I gave another spin to some of my favourite sections of Foxtrot (CAS 1058) by Genesis, and ‘Get ‘Em Out by Friday’ has stuck with me for days ever since. I like the way the music is filled with all the things the enemies of prog-rock love to hate: sudden changes in mood, time signature, tone and attack. The unpredictable dynamics and expressive emotions (minor key chords suggest the mood is sinister, melancholy, then completely intolerable) all tend to convey the sense of a situation that’s getting out of control – which is perfect for the subtext of the song’s story, where human greed is getting out of control. In Gabriel’s observation on social injustice, defenceless tenants are evicted in the name of corporate profit-making, and move from one unbearable scenario to another. Eventually all mankind is doomed to a dystopian future where our very bodies have to undergo physical change in the service of making yet more profits.

The song is also of course notorious as an example of the eccentric music-theatre of Genesis, with Gabriel acting out the voices and emotions of all the characters, and working to a libretto that’s complete with stage directions, character names and narrative scene-changer cards (none of which are sung in the lyrics). It’s a three-act play compressed into 8 minutes.

In 1976 the French bande desineé artist Jean Solé delivered a highly dramatic rendering of Gabriel’s skills, dubbing him ‘the Fregoli of rock’ in the process. I found my copy of Fluide Glacial No 8 (the magazine he co-founded) which contains the story, and present a scanned copy here for your interest. The strip starts off with a dead-on rendering of the band and their logo, then launches into a bizarre and excessive flight of fantasy in which Gabriel performs his changes with the help of masks, costumes, wigs, false breasts, and assorted lumps of inflatable rubber. For added comedic effect, he’s required to make these lighting-changes while he’s actually singing the song; as he gets more agitated, things go spectacularly wrong and he ends up with mismatched body parts, false noses, teeth, spectacles and props flying everywhere.

It’s the last two pages where Solé switches tone, and with some relish provides us with very visual depictions of the consequences of enacting the restriction on humanoid height, as decreed by “Genetic Control”. Crude surgery is performed by militaristic robots on the sullen and resigned populace, who submit to this grisly fate on an assembly line. It’s like a downbeat, x-rated version of the body-part shape-shifting comedy we’ve seen enacted in the first two pages of the story. Solé is embroidering considerably on this part of the song, finding a degree of violence and dehumanisation which Gabriel may not have intended. French 1970s comics did, I think, sometimes subscribe to a Marxist philosophy which could probably be traced back to the roots of Situationism. The creators have subtitled this story to ask the direct question “when will the housing scandals end?” and the appreciative audience at the end make comparisons to Beckett, Ionesco and Kafka -all masters of absurd drama and fiction.

I’m also quite taken with the translation (by A. Dister) of Gabriel’s lyric into French. “They say it’s all right” becomes “Ils affirment que c’est normal”, which is arguably a much more precise rendering of the meaning of the lyric. It also draws attention to the underlying message of this song, which presents us with a series of increasingly brutal, life-changing events, all in the name of making money for John Pebble enterprises – only to be told ‘c’est normal’ at every turn. The slimy character of The Winkler is the one telling us it’s all right, trying to normalise the eviction and rent-raising, telling us it’s in ‘the interest of humanity’. What a fitting depiction of the ravages of monopoly capitalism, and one we can all recognise today when we get the same response from spin-doctors, politicians and advertisers if we ask questions about genetically-modified crops, third-world labour to produce sneakers, or the real costs of cheap petrol. In short, we’re all Mrs Barrows! Capitalism gets its way because we’re told there’s no other way of running the world. “Ils affirment que c’est normal.”

Couple of items from the 1000Füssler label arrived here in August. This Hamburg label has tended to seek out quite extreme and difficult experiments in the field recording area, and Rui Costa’s Sightseeing for the Blind (1000FÜSSLER 012) could probably fit quite comfortably within that general description. In 2005 he tried to find his way around Lisbon effectively using a couple of binaural microphones as his eyes, soaking up whatever these metallic monsters could ’see’ at the end of their hypersensitive tips. The resultant 26 minutes of unusual murmurings, clankings and echoey claps has been transformed into a species of sound composition, while Costa ruminates on the psychogeographical implications of his sonic maps. To assist him with further imaginary cartographic activities, five other sound artists contributed short works to this set: Marc Behrens, Maile Colbert, Bill Jarboe, Pali Mersault and Gregory Büttner. The once-familiar urban space is now, for me, transformed into a completely alien zone of whited-out vistas with a dank mist hanging over all.

From same label, Simon Whetham’s D/R (1000FÜSSLER 013) is the output from a performance-installation work he instigated in Estonia under the project name of Co-LAB ‘08. Some friends and collaborators assisted in these very extreme events which involved radical transformation of field recordings, a speciality of this UK-born composer, and also some quite physical changes in the gallery space too. Absurdist performance actions, carried out by Yoko Ishiguro, were also part of the events. Very little of this drama has translated onto the slow-moving and anonymous recordings we hear, but there is plenty of bewilderment and strangeness. The photos on the cover seem to show us the remnants of excitement which we missed hours ago; the gallery space, chalked writings on the floor, is strewn with furniture and apparatus in a mild state of disarray.

New York composer Andrew Byrne had White Bone Country (NEW WORLD RECORDS 80696-2) released in August last year. On it, the prepared piano of Stephen Gosling is accompanied by the metallic and clinky percussion of David Shively. There’s a 17-minute piece called ‘Fata Morgana: Mirages on the Horizon’ which will be of interest to fans of the cinema of Werner Herzog, but the main event is ‘White Bone Country’, which is intended explicitly as narrative-styled portraits of the sort of enormous and bleak desert landscapes you find in North America. As such, Byrne’s compressed and precise music is indeed, as he claims, more in the tradition of Henry Cowell (that exquisite early modernist miniature painter) than the New York school of minimalism and its descendants. A totally charming record of very absorbing and listenable musical studies.

New Zealand droner supremo Peter Wright tells us that An Angel Fell Where The Kestrels Hover (SPEKK KK022), a sky-gazing prediction which reached us in December. Recorded ‘live to disc’ in London during 2007, Wright’s heavily processed and sumptuous guitar effusions pour into your lap like a bucket of golden syrup enriched with lysergic drugs. The primary influences on this work includes Wright’s particular location, the changing effects of the weather, and his own emotional reactions to these things. To put it another way, any old biddy can stand in line at a bus stop in Tooting Bec and complain about the awful rain we’ve been having lately, but it takes a musician like Wright to sublimate the experience and turn it into music.

Marc Arsenault and Joshua Baker come to improvised guitar music from a background in avant-rock bands, and now call themselves Nickname: Rebel and Offset Needle Radius respectively. On Nickname: Rebel Vs Offset Needle Radius (WOW COOL 24/005), they turn in some very credible meandering guitar-scaping episodes full of vast abstractions and intricate scrapey doodles, largely avoiding unpleasant noise or feedback in favour of continuous, real-time playing, only slightly enhanced with foreign-sounding effects and treatments. Intriguing material on offer, but I keep listening out for the moments when the duo cease to tread around each other like two cautious cats, and start to cut loose with some of the impolite energy that you might have hoped for from their punk rock backgrounds.

Terra Incognita is the duo of Charles Butler throwing out hot licks a-plenty from his banjo and dobro in time to toned-down trip-hop beats supplied by Adam Cremona. It’s kind of interesting that the duo are based in Nashville, and I wonder how this slightly unusual take on traditional American musics goes down among listeners in the heartland of the country and western music industry. A nice enough record, but I cannot share the press release’s view that this EP represents ‘groundbreaking folktronica’. Butler, skilled as he is, exhibits little interest in exploring the limits of folk forms, improvisation and the very sound of the banjo in the same way as Uncle Woody Sullender, who is to my mind a far more radical and inventive player. From November 2009.

The American warrior Daniel Menche has, for the time being at least, moved away from the extreme drum-based records which have been arriving here in recent years. His Kataract (EDITIONS MEGO DeMEGO 008) struck me as a real return to the form of music he does best of all, i.e. wild and blistering heat-death noise. I was astonished to find that this powerful assault was derived primarily from field recordings of waterfalls in the pacific Northwest of the US. But then again that isn’t really so surprising, given the unstoppable power of this most overwhelming of nature’s manifestations; a water cannon aimed directly at your face would do less damage than one of these aquatic piledrivers. Keen readers and listeners will remember that Russel Haswell has recently paid homage to the power of England’s waterfalls on his Wild Tracks CD for the same label (noted here). Some fine illustrations by Emily Hyde adorn this, another essential Mego monster.

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The Sound Projector Radio Show 10 February 2010

1. Thomas Brinkmann, ‘Jutta I’ from ERNST 05
2. Gas, (Track 5) from Zauberberg
3. Thomas Brinkmann, ‘Beate I’ from ERNST 01
4. Gas, (Track 3) from Königsforst
5. Thomas Brinkmann, ‘Clara I’ from ERNST 02
6. Gas, (Track 4) from Pop
7. Thomas Brinkmann, ‘Doris I’ from ERNST 02
8. Gas, (Track 4) from Gas
9. Thomas Brinkmann, ‘Frauke 2′ from ERNST 03
10. Gas, (Track 1) from Pop
11. Thomas Brinkmann, ‘Erika I’ from ERNST 03
12. Gas, (Track 3) from Gas

All Thomas Brinkmann selections released in 1998 on the ERNST label.

All Gas selections (untitled) from Nah Und Fern, GERMANY KOMPAKT CD66 4 x CD (2008)

Previous shows in this series:

• Severe Esther I
• Severe Esther II